SESSION 407 Thursday, May 11, 10:00am - 11:00am Track: The Executive Perspective The Era of Shift-Left: A Case Study in Cost Reduction Richard Sykora Product Support Manager, Blackbaud richard.sykora@blackbaud.com Session Description By reducing the cost of support while improving the customer experience, it s easy to see why shift-left is taking the tech support industry by storm. In this session, you ll get a real-world, behind-the-scenes look at the shift-left transformation that enabled Blackbaud to reduce operating costs by $1 million while maintaining a 93% customer satisfaction rating. Speaker Background Richard Sykora has been in customer service management for more than eighteen years. Taking best practices from one organization and applying them to the next organization, Richard has developed successful models that are relevant to any organization, in any industry. Experienced in a wide range of service delivery models, including national and global operations, Richard currently manages internet product support teams at Blackbaud and is a keynote speaker in the customer service arena.
Session 407: The Era of Shift Left: A Case Study in Cost Reduction Richard Sykora
Agenda Quick Intro Why Change Assessing The Needs What is Shift-Left Blackbaud s Journey To Shift- Left Q&A Richard Sykora 20 + Years in Support and Customer Service National & Global Operations Small to Medium (6 seats to 420) HDI Member, Past Speaker Community Leader/Career Counselor Currently Blackbaud Support Leadership Team Lean Practitioner
BHAG Purposeful Support Practices Are You A Change Leader?
Change Leader Instill a sense of urgency Pick a good team Create a vision and supporting strategies Communicate Remove Obstacles Change fast Keep on changing Make Change Stick Assessing Needs It s tough to be strategic when you are delivering daily operations tactically STRATEGIC TACTICAL OPERATIONAL Creating long-term vision, goals, and objectives based on achieving a desired end result Implementing projects or continuous improvements moving closer to achieve your strategic goals Repetitive activities that are the day-to-day core processes that achieve the tactical performance goals, objectives, and SLA s 8
Assessing Needs Service leaders must allocate the right amount of time for strategic thinking and initiatives to: 1. Align goals and objectives 2. Establish directives to govern scope of services 3. Build success metrics to measure business value 9 Assessing Needs How to execute Innovation in any organization Your Performance Engine Your daily grind, keep the lights on 3 Models: S - Small (Kaizens) R - Repeatable (Innovation turns into daily operations) C - Custom (Unique Innovation requiring specified resources)
Assessing Needs Know where you are Assessing your current performance around service strategy, structure (support model), process, people, tools and metrics is an all-important baseline. Know where you are going Envisioning the end result is a core part of defining your service strategy. Know how you plan to get there The continuous improvement roadmap is the result of your gapanalysis assessment against your future-state. 11 Areas of Opportunity Improve process efficiency, integration, and cooperation across all customer touchpoints. Provide the same customer experience across all channels. Discontinue supporting customers through different band aide processes/systems (Snowflakes and Unicorns). Anticipate customers needs and be proactive.
Impact of Millennials in Support More likely to reach out to customer service, Millennials display some unique patterns while they do so: They're more likely to reuse the product or interact with the brand after an issue has been resolved. More loyal than Boomers. Prefer self-service for issue resolution and avoid call centers whenever possible. They want to get service on their own time. If forced to talk to a person, they will, but they'd rather avoid it. They want to be able to handle issues largely through self-service channels. Assuming they get something in exchange for their information, they're willing to share their data (communities). Note: Info from a 600,000 consumers study from JD Powers Desired Results 1. Achieving First Contact Resolution 2. Making KCS a Priority 3. Mapping Call Types for Action 4. Introducing Customer- Impacting Technologies 5. Reduce Cost if Possible Resolve difficult problems faster Increase first contact resolution Deliver a more consistent and memorable customer experience 14
Shift-Left 2011 Gartner, Inc. Cost Data 15 The Supporting Structure
Ways to Calculate Costs In order to understand where you are going in Shift-Left, and where you will wind up, need to have a system to calculate costs. Several ways to calculate cost (Be Consistent). Cost per case Cost per customer Total Cost of Ownership (who resolved the case) Blackbaud s Story Support Transformation Project Transformed & Updated: Telephony Work Force Management Chat Knowledge Management (KCS) Search engines Communities Videos Self-service content Older systems, content updates needed, change with the times. Research on best practices etc., Content designed with a customer perspective (in their voice). Needs to be funded both capitol investment and cost savings (ROI).
That Which We Call A Rose By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet Emerging Shift-Left strategies. Utilized Call Data to drive customer consumable content. Created Chat penetration strategies. Identified KB Coaches and Champions. Created Webinars for proactive content delivery. Created/updated Communities for peer-to-peer interactions via Community Managers. Strategically embedded videos within software. Game Changer: KCS Search opened outside firewall! Results Increased KB Unique Users to 50,000. In Community, increased unique registered users to 20,000 Page views. Increased over 300,000 page views quarterly Increased the number of blogs viewed by 100,000 Year- Over-Year(YOY). Decreased contact volume by 21% by embedding the product video links in the software. Successfully accomplished all of these changes in spite of an 8% increase in clients. Support volume remained flat or less YOY. Reduced yearly operating costs going forward by $1M+. Maintained Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores at 93% or higher. Success resulted in several industry awards, including finalist HDI Service Improvement 2016.
Results Number of Unique KB users accessing system Community Page Views Per Quarter Incoming volume trending down despite an 8% growth in clients Q&A, Contact Me! Q&A Richard Sykora Richard.Sykora@Blackbaud.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardsykora
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